Need 2no 250 Gb SATA hard drives for a media centre pc and want them to be as quiet as possible.

Seagate used to be good but recent reviews have been dissapointing.

So any ides, reccomendations.

I personally recommend Seagate, but i have reason to believe that.

Failing that Samsung spinpoints are nice and quiet.. well the ones i have seen/used are.

Please note:

All views shown on this forum are my own opinions and do not represent the views of my employer or any other party.

I know seagate now own maxtor, but i would still choose a maxtor over a seagate. I have heard good things about hitachi

Performance etc of the Hitachi drives is good... but I've not had a great deal of reliability.. 3 of the 4 drives I bought last year have been back to the shop to be exchanged now :(

Glad I'm using RAID is all I can say

Im pretty sure the samsungs are the quietest drives around these days.. ive got a 1/2 terabyte seagate and its seeks are quite loud

Another vote here for the Samsung spinpoint as the quietest:)

Yeah was looking at the spinpoint, however unless I have missed something they max out at 160 gb which would be a little on the low side. Will have to have a look at the rest of the samsung range.

edit- getting confused as I was looking at the spinpoint s series and not realising the rest were also called spinpoint

I always use Western Digital - mainly for historic reasons, because I've never had one fail *touches wood*

Hitachi I wouldn't touch, because of ongoing reliability concerns. Spinpoints would probably be my weapon of choice in this situation though, because of quietness and their use of fluid bearings.

Nope, you can get Spinpoints in excess of 160 - see THIS link to what Dabs have available from them. Upto a 500.

Steve

Ditto on the samsung, have several and they are practically silent.

I dont know what the concerns are regarding hitachi deskstar drives, they are also quiet if setup right. We have 4 300GB drives in several machines at home, and they have been running fine. 2 of these have been running 24/7/365 since I installed them more than 12 months ago.

Ditto on the samsung, have several and they are practically silent.

I dont know what the concerns are regarding hitachi deskstar drives, they are also quiet if setup right. We have 4 300GB drives in several machines at home, and they have been running fine. 2 of these have been running 24/7/365 since I installed them more than 12 months ago.

I was under the impression that the Hitachi drives were decent as well..

Maybe they had a duff batch go out, but I bought the drives in pairs from 2 different suppliers several months apart and within 12 months 3 of them have been replaced due to failure. :(

I know seagate now own maxtor, but i would still choose a maxtor over a seagate. I have heard good things about hitachi

I don't see why you would specifically use a maxtor over a seagate since in many cases they are the same drive just with different firmware and label.

I can not publicly comment further on that

Regarding reliability, I had the best part of 400 drives from a couple of manufacturers and after having them put them through a hard test there were about 3 or 4 dead drives.

This is totally acceptable IMHO as they are mechanical devices.

Please note:

All views shown on this forum are my own opinions and do not represent the views of my employer or any other party.

Well ordered a couple of samsungs, shall wait and see.

The other thing about harddrives is the stigma they can have. I bought some Maxtor diamondmad 9 drives (some time ago when they were new to the market) and had sooo many failure, it was disconcerting. When I RMA'd them, the returned drive was a reconditioned that didn't last as long as the new drive it replaced :eek:

Of course, I now find it very difficult to buy a Maxtor drive due to previous personal experience. But then again, the models out nowadays are completely different and so you cannot attache the reliability of yesterday's drives with today's offerings.

I mean, after all, most of us here are driving Skodas

It is best to look at the failure information for thousands of drives .... that way you can work out which one to buy for home

Please note:

All views shown on this forum are my own opinions and do not represent the views of my employer or any other party.

Have used Maxtor for the last few years of my PC business and have yet to see one fail. Probably got over 500 of them out there in service. Some machines will obviously have been retired or updated but there are still plenty of machines in offices with the Maxtors going strong for several years.

Have one in SWMBO Shuttle and it is very quiet, you do hear it seek, but have to be in a very quiet room to hear it running generally.

Chris

TBH drives usually fail in the first few hours of operation or fail after a reasonable life. A failure during normal operational life is less common if the drives are cooled properly and handled correctly etc.

Please note:

All views shown on this forum are my own opinions and do not represent the views of my employer or any other party.

Think that's a fairly sweeping statement TBH. I've had numerous drives, in work situations and from various manufacturers, that have failed within 12 months. Depends what you consider 'reasonable life' really...

Steve

Those of you who know what I do for a living will understand where I am coming from, but I can't really go into it on a public forum I'm afraid.

You will also note that I added a condition about sufficient cooling and correct handling on the drives including mounting in such a way as to minimise vibration etc.

I am not saying you do not get failures, far from it, just that most failures will become evident very early on in a drives life or will come past a point of "reasonable life".

Please note:

All views shown on this forum are my own opinions and do not represent the views of my employer or any other party.

I'm looking for an external hard drive to go with our laptop - one that powers off the USB rather than needing to use another socket (which are already rare commodities in our study)

any recommendations ?

seagate give you a five year warranty on hard drives, that ud pretty much clinch it for me!

Though if it does fail, it's perhaps not much consolation to get a new drive FOC, after your data's been trashed on the old one

Though if it does fail, it's perhaps not much consolation to get a new drive FOC, after your data's been trashed on the old one

But everyone knows mechanical devices fail and a good backup strategy is required

This refers to any drive of any make and is not specifically directed at any manufacturer.

Please note:

All views shown on this forum are my own opinions and do not represent the views of my employer or any other party.

Those of you who know what I do for a living will understand where I am coming from, but I can't really go into it on a public forum I'm afraid.

You will also note that I added a condition about sufficient cooling and correct handling on the drives including mounting in such a way as to minimise vibration etc.

I am not saying you do not get failures, far from it, just that most failures will become evident very early on in a drives life or will come past a point of "reasonable life".

Bathtub curve / MTBF is what it is all about. I guess you are in a quality engineering role?

For those that are not involved in quality engineering, if a drive has a manufacturing defect there is a very high probability that it will fail early in its service life. When I built and sold PCs I used to burn mine in using a benchamrking software to push everything up to max for a day (minimum) before releasing the PC to the customer.

Once all the obvious defects are "used up" the probability of failure in normal service life is relatively very low. Anything that was going to go wrong has already happened.

On service beyond the rated life, the wear of the components starts to become relevant and failure probability will become higher with age.

Things you can do to help are to mount the drive in a well cooled environment (every 5 deg C above rated operating temp will typically half the life of the component). Have the drive in a secure mount free from any sources of impact or vibration. I once saw a machine that kept failing due to HDD bearings going. The machine was on a bench attached to the wall on the other side of which was mounted a big aircon condenser unit. The vibration was brunelling the bearings when the machine was not running.

Chris

Had a Maxtor 1TB external drive set as RAID 1........Failed after 3 days of backups. the replacement has already outlived that.....

Simon - the Samsung spinpoints are great drives - the rig you got off me last year has one in, albeit the 160Gb.

The other PC you've said you'll get off me also has a spinpoint drive - i think 250gb, not sure, but a quick check at the Ultimate PC thread on here would confirm.

The only thing making a noise in that one is the CD drive......heheheh

Had a Maxtor 1TB external drive set as RAID 1........Failed after 3 days of backups. the replacement has already outlived that.....

Simon - the Samsung spinpoints are great drives - the rig you got off me last year has one in, albeit the 160Gb.

The other PC you've said you'll get off me also has a spinpoint drive - i think 250gb, not sure, but a quick check at the Ultimate PC thread on here would confirm.

The only thing making a noise in that one is the CD drive......heheheh

Must confess to not using that drive as I swapped it straight out, that said its reasurring to get more reccomendations for the same drive, and to know my new gaming pc will be whisper quiet.